Expose: Archive of (by) Yutaka Matsuzawa

This chapter introduces the archive of Yutaka Matsuzawa (1922–2006) in Suwa, Nagano, Japan. Matsuzawa is known as the founding father of Japanese conceptualism, and his extensive archival materials, including manuscripts, letters, mail art, works from other artists, and ephemera, have been studied only in recent years. The focus of this chapter is the artist’s role in building her or his archive. Matsuzawa’s self-archiving started with the ‘Psi room’—a studio-cum-room-installation/artwork/archive of Matsuzawa’s and other artists’ works from the 1950s to the 1970s. The author, an artist herself, wants to demonstrate through a critical survey of Matsuzawa’s archive how this micro-cosmos of just one artist could open to the interconnection of artists and ideas of the global scale.